Next Tuesday the Swiss Institute in Rome will host the artist Artur Zmijewski at ESC, an autonomous atelier in Rome. It will be a chance to look into the main subject of the upcoming Berlin Biennale (April 27 – July 1) and to discover the contents of Forget Fear– the first publication of this Biennale – with the curator of this edition in an unconventional location. Edited by Artur Zmijewski and Joanna Warsza, Forget Fear is a report on real action within culture, on the uses of artistic pragmatism. It is about concrete dealings by artists, curators, and politicians that lead to visible effects.

“We’re interested in finding answers, not asking questions. We’re interested in situations where art acts for real and solutions are proposed and implemented responsibly. We are interested neither in preserving artistic immunity nor in distancing ourselves from society. We consider politics to be among the most complex and difficult of human activities. We sought out people – artists, activists, politicians – who engage in substantive politics through art.”

The reflection on water of the landscape outside MAXXI, a video installation that deals with unfinished masterpieces of music and architecture, a video installation recounting the mystery of ritual and a fluid environment composed of images, sound and forms in movement: the four works conceived for the museum space by the finalists of the 2012 edition of the Premio Italia Arte Contemporanea 2012: Giorgio Andreotta Calò, Patrizio Di Massimo, Adrian Paci and Luca Trevisani.

The exhibition Differenza e ripetizione, curated by Gigiotto Del Vecchio, takes its name from the philosopher Gilles Deleuze’s book “Difference and Repetition”, focuses on a fundamental theme: the concept of difference and its relationship with identity and repetition. It also explores the possibility of combining – through art – the intimate, private sphere with collective and external experience. Narration plays an important role and becomes a spur to artistic creativity on several different levels.

Trieste is the name of the Italian-built deep-diving bathyscaphe with a crew of two people, which, in 1960, reached a record maximum depth in the deepest known part of the Earth’s oceans in the Mariana Trench. The dive has never been repeated, and presently no manned or unmanned craft exists capable of reaching such depth. Trieste is also the small port city on the Adriatic in the north of Italy that borders Slovenia, known for its moodiness and changeability.

The group exhibition metaphorically takes inspiration by these two ‘borderline’ realities and draws to the idea of the unknown and the impossible. Each artist, in his or her own right, is attracted to these aspects.The five American-based artists share a very close friendship and had extensive conversations around these themes in the years.

Jay Heikes, who had a leading role in processing the show, says: “I can see in all of us a desire to harness the power of everything that has moved through our minds into our works. Through them I can see a grappling with history and culture, a nod or something like an elaboration of the less traveled dead ends that have been lost. I think ‘explorers’ is a goofy word but perfect for all of us who leave ourselves open to explore those spaces as the only places where the possibilities lie. In Matthew’s work I have always found the condensation of historical objects to be both severe and disorienting. As if history was visible like a mountain range, only to realize our eyes are not strong enough to see more than an hour away. In Erin’s work the severity is taken to another level where the formal gaps are not time machines but parameters of claim. Spaces where language appears obsolete but is constant and constantly mutating in order to describe itself.The tools and ‘relics’Jessica is always aware of a culture may be as malleable as the materials that made them and of the objects that are not only framing us as figures in a space but as messy minds trying to categorize ‘things’. I think that is why her work appears to be a collision of domesticity and surrealism. Like daydreaming the wildest daydream while waiting for your toast to pop up. Then there’s Karthik and I who are both dedicated to forms of research trying to connect the links that history has naturally worked to splinter.

This is why this interest in the double, maybe triple meaning of Trieste is so great, because really it becomes an idea of a place or a space. So with any group show it is impossible to declare what the show will be doing but more about setting up an environment for something special to happen. This is Trieste.”

the exhibition will include new works exclusively created for the show by Matthew Day Jackson, Jessica Jackson Hutchins, Jay Heikes, Karthik Pandian and Erin Shirreff.(more…)

Italian Conversations – Art in the age of Berlusconi is the result of an itinerant residency of the Dutch collective Fucking Good Art (Rob Hamelijnck and Nienke Terpsma) in Italy, who placed themselves as outsider observers of the complex Italian cultural scene in the current political and economical background. Starting from an investigation of the territory, through a travel and study experience, the volume provides a mapping of the current cultural Italian situation, at the same time positioning itself as an original critical research.

Epipedon (from greek “epi”, above, and “pedon”, soil) is the horizon that takes shape at the surface of soil, and in which the structure of the parent rock is thus modified that it is not recognized anymore; furthermore, by the presence of organic substance it occurs with darker colors .

Epipedon gathers together twelve Italian artists of the last generations Salvatore Arancio, Francesco Arena, Francesco Barocco, Sergio Breviario, Chiara Camoni, Francesco Carone, Giulio Delvè, Ettore Favini, Francesco Mernini, Marco Morici, Giovanni Oberti e Luca Trevisani, who have been asked to reflect on the possibility of a different perception of sculpture, no longer as it is usually observed in 360 degrees or from the classical point of view of a person’s average height.

Each artist involved in the project worked on the concept of translating the line of horizon, such as to offer the viewer a considerably visionary landscape and to change the location of the work of art in space, according to an assumption already implemented by the master Giorgio De Chirico in the famous painting “The Disquieting muses”. (more…)